Thursday, February 18, 2010

Links for 2/18/10

Under threat of losing their jobs if they didn’t go along with extra work for not a lot of extra pay, the Central Falls Teachers’ Union refused Friday morning to accept a reform plan for one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.

The superintendent didn’t blink either.

After learning of the union’s position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School...

lenders currently receive quarterly subsidies when loans they hold are in repayment. Their incentive is thus to keep borrowers active and not to let them default, for if they do, the lender could lose around 3 percent of the loan’s value. By contrast, guaranty agencies and collection agencies get sizeable subsidies for defaulted loans. When a loan defaults, the guaranty agency can tack on collection costs that can easily be upward of 20 percent. The agency also gets to keep 16 percent of any amounts it collects. If the guaranty agency, collection agency and lender are the same company, that subsidy can certainly be enough to wipe out any other losses it might sustain from a default.

One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I've seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of study time and academic engagement among undergraduates…

there doesn't seem to be much difference, in general, between study time and academic outcomes…

Remember the Eastern European joke about wages under communism, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"? Perhaps there is an undergraduate counterpart: "We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us."